For Blog Against Sexism Day, Chris Clarke turns in a post about the history of the environmental movement and the women in it, with some fascinating words at the end about rape metaphors and environmental depradation:
Underscoring the metaphor, the landscape being discussed was often described as being, before resource extraction, “virgin.” Dave Brower once said, famously and jocularly, that wilderness was where the hand of man had not set foot. These activists had some other appendage in mind. To them, rape was clearly an act by which some man claimed ownership of something that was rightfully the common property of us all, and ruined it for the rest of us. How are we to be expected to enjoy partaking of the virgin forest once it has been raped? Aside from some rather mystical Earth First!ers — most of them women — whose activism was informed by an animist sensibility, few interpreted the trope as signifying that the forest, a discrete entity with a right to existence and self determination, had had its integrity and will and dignity thwarted by force.
To call environmental destruction “rape” is to achieve the startling and counterintuitive accomplishment of trivializing both sins. In using the metaphor, the writer both inflates the importance of a single individual to that of a huge complex of millions of individuals and reduces the anguish of a bonafide rape victim to some pallid parallel, a gouge in a hillside. The metaphor relies on the equation of women to passive, non-sentient resources, and it masks the true nature and depth of the damage to the landscape. It equates rape with the taking of something of monetary value that rightfully belongs to a third party. It assigns women the status of scenery, and we the environmentally concerned—who would husband that violated landscape—are cast as the true victims.
I have seen trivializing rape metaphors all over the place. Sixty bucks for a “vintage” dashiki-print rayon shirt at Anthropologie, for example, is just like being brutally sexually violated. I don’t know whether to laugh or cry when I see it edging out “gay” as a synonym for “awful.”
I have also seen some very reasoned attempts to analyze attitudes towards the land–responsibility, “husbandry,” possession, communal possession, violation, protection, utility, purpose, dependency, order, God’s gift to mankind, Mother Nature, natural/unnatural–in light of patriarchal attitudes towards women. I agree that that’s not what’s happening here: as Chris says, the metaphor depends on uncritically accepting certain attitudes towards women that are dehumanizing.
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And, on the other hand, depends on uncritically accepting certain attitudes towards “the environment” (I put that in quotes because it tnd to imply that it’s something that we’re seperate from) that totally miss the point of why environmental destruction is bad.
THANK YOU.
I cannot put into words what I feel whenever someone — typically it has been men who have said this sort of thing within my earshot — compares anything else to rape. High taxes (as in, the government taking away money that rightfully belongs to someone else — wouldn’t this be more accurately described as _theft_?), a store overcharging for something, the mistreatment of workers (which is, I’ll agree, serious: but it’s not rape unless it is)…
They’re searching for a word that lends a certain level of gravity to communicate what they’re trying to say, and they settle on “rape”. It does, come to think about it, remind me of how many times “literally” is used when someone means “actually”, or “seriously”, or something of that sort. Except, of course, that trivialization of the word “rape” is obviously more serious.
KnifeGhost, that’s an interesting observation. If you’d be willing to expand on it some, either here or at my joint (or both!) I’d be interested to see what you had to say.
Chris, I’m going to go ahead and assume that you’re being sarcastic, and you’re going for a particularly dry “I just said that.”
I know you did. I was just word-upping the shit.
Ha! No, for once, I was being straightforward. I know I did approach that point sidelong, but I really would be interested if you have further thoughts.
I always find it safer to assume sarcasm and be wrong than be the dorky new kid the in-crowd is pretending to like.
Anyways, the short expansion here has to do with…. I dunno. Anthropomorphizing “nature” such that it is a body that can be violated, and thus the hurt is to Mother Nature, or whatever. False. Nature is, in a very literal sense, out life support system. When we hurt the environment (and that more or less means consuming natural resources faster than they can be replaced) we decrease the ability of the earth to sustain life, including our own. Midnight Oil’s analogy is more apt — “how can we sleep when our beds are burning?” (I can fucking believe I just name-checked Midnight Oil.)
If memory serves, you linked an interview you did with Ward Churchill here or on Pandagon a few months ago. Next year I’m starting my MA, and I intend to study First Nations activism in Canada. E-mail and we’ll talk business.
OK, here’s my entry for Blog Against Sexism day … which is a day late. But still. There was a “study” by the AP hysterically reporting that girls DRINK AND HAVE SEX during spring break. Duh. Last I heard, boys DRINK AND HAVE SEX during spring break as well, but no one’s going ape about that.
Wow. The patriarchy is so deeply ingrained in our language that we don’t even recognize it. I never even thought about this one, but the metaphor of raping virgin land reminds me of a comment I read on a blog somewhere from some asshole – that in a communist society, women’s bodies would be shared as public property. I couldn’t quite understand how someone could have that idea, but there’s definitely an implication that women are more resource than human–and it’s right there in the words we use…
How deep do we have to dig into ourselves to be free of this? It’s a little disheartening to me.
But I admit I am less concerned about the “sixty-dollar shirt” rape metaphor. No, it’s not really at all like being brutally, sexually violated, but then, I didn’t really get murdered on that geography test, either.
Richard Lederer had a chapter in one of his books on how violent our language is. Here’s a quote I found from it:
Personally, I don’t see a whole lot wrong with describing desecrating something, using it for your own prupose without regard to its needs, and then abandoning it to recover as best it can as rape. AS a matter of fact, given that rape is generally seen as an a exercise in power and not sexuality, I think it is an apt description.
Neither should the virgin metaphor misunderstood. A “non virgin” landscape is in no way bad. When humans begin to interact with nature both are changed, so this can be seen as the equivalent as losing one virginity. Sometimes the results are wonderful, sometimes not. Not only are cities examples of the the effect of humans; so too is much of the Australian bush and even the great plains before Europeans arrived in America.
I think there’s a misconception here that the term “rape” is being borrowed from it’s “proper” context of “sexual assault.” But that’s not the original meaning of the term.
The word “rape” is a derivative of the latin rapere, which means “to snatch.” In fact the use of the word in context of sexual assault merely serves to perpetuate the sexist idea that a woman’s sexuality is a possession that must be taken from her; not an action she participates in as an equal. The word “rape” could be seen to devalue women’s sexuality as a whole.
Certainly, it’s an insensitive hyperbole to equate paying too much for clothes to a brutal act of sexual violence that has life-long repercussions for the victim. Is it sexist? Not really; the word means “to steal”. It’s the use of the word “rape” to describe sexual assault that is sexist, not the other way around.
I don’t find that argument particularly convincing, chet, because the meaning of words isn’t fixed. “Rape” may originally have meant “theft,” but that’s not what it means now. It means sexual assault. The etymology of the word is interesting but not terribly relevent.
I think Chris basically answered that when he said this:
People are not *things.* Rape isn’t an assault against a *thing*: it’s an assault against a person, who has the right to give or withhold consent. If you assign subjectivity to the land, then it’s analogous on some level. But the overwhelming majority of environmentalists don’t think of the land as a living creature with thoughts and feelings and the right to decide what happens to itself. Therefore, the metaphor completely misses the point of rape, which is that it’s an assault against a person’s right to decide what happens to his or her own body.
I think the stolen thing originally referred to was not sexuality, but virginity. This by no means contradicts the assertion that rapere and its original use to describe sexual assault was part of a sexist understanding of rape. In modern terms, I suppose you could argue that we see other things as being stolen away–bodily sovreignity, for example, or a basic sense of safety. I don’t think it’s terribly important, since this etymology and its implications are completely unknown to people who use the word “rape.”
The word “rape”comes from a word that means, “to steal.” It comes from a word that was used to refer to all kinds of theft. That doesn’t mean that when we hear “rape”–or when environmentalists say “rape”–there are no connotations specific to sexual violence. These days, we use “steal” to mean steal, along with a host of other words–depredation, for example–that are not more often used to refer to sexual assault.
The word “idiot” derives from the Latin, and before that the Greek, words for “layman” or “person without professional skills.” But were I to call a commenter here an idiot, which rest assured I would never do, I doubt that person would be mollified were I to claim that I merely meant to refer to his amateur status.
The activists I talked to definitely used the word as a metaphor for sexual assault. The parallel with “virgin landscape,” as well as referring to the land being “fucked over” and “screwed” (though those are much more diluted idioms, which word incidentally shares an Ancient Greek root with “idiot”) made it very clear to me that these activists were sexualizing the landscape and landscapizing women.
If my post failed to make that clear to the lay reader, I apologize.
That’s a great point. Another possible way to look at it is that what is being stolen, in the case of the rape of a married woman, is the right to exclusive sexual access belonging to her husband. (Again, another sexist approach.)
I don’t know that this is the case. I mean, the examples given – “man, the GAP really raped me for this t-shirt” or whatever – seem to imply that the speaker is completely aware of the definition of “rape” as “theft”, since they’re saying that their money was essentially stolen. So it seems that the only people who are unaware of this etymology of the word are the people complaining that sexual assault is being trivialized.
I think when environmentalists use the term, they’re referring to theft and plunder against something that can’t defend itself. The connotation to me seems more about images of Vikings “raping and pillaging”. That’s not really less sexist, I guess.
I dunno. Good points, though. Thank you.
I respectfully call bullshit. Next time you hear a frat guy lament that his Calculus midterm raped him in the ass, ask him if he’s aware of the etymology of the word “rape”. He probably his. He meant that his Calculus midterm stole his ass.
I disagree, particularly since you hear “rape” used to describe any unpleasant experience. I think that what they’re doing is re-divorcing the sexual-assault connotation from “rape,” not harkening back to some earlier definition they probably aren’t even aware of. As far as they’re concerned, it’s a graphic hyperbolic way of referencing assault/violation/general-unpleasantness. This usage therefore has a tendency to trivialize literal rape.
And sorry, but I know the etymology of the word. I also know that etymology concerns a word’s origins, which may or may not have any bearing on its lexical meaning nowadays. But if you want to talk etymological logic, look at this: the ancient Romans, like the people using “rape” to mean “overcharged,” were thinking along similar lines as expressed in the definitions they use: rape is nothing extraordinary. Theft like any other theft.